Archaeological Museum of Mykonos
Grave stelae and funerary urns exhumed from a sacred island's ancient burial purge, alongside a rare relief pithos of the Trojan Horse.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos opens on Rheneia in 426 BC, when Athenian workers began digging up every grave on the sacred island of Delos across the strait and rowing the dead here in silence, driven by a warning from an oracle about what a god as pure as Apollo could tolerate near his birthplace. It follows that purification through the centuries of burials that piled up on Rheneia, and to the 1897 discovery that finally explained why this museum exists at all, built in 1902 to hold what came out of the ground. Walk the rooms and you're moving through the stelae, urns and votive vases that fear of offending a god once put underground.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Archaeological Site of Delos
Sacred ruins of a pan-Hellenic sanctuary where birth and death were once forbidden by law.
Archaeological Museum of Delos
Marble treasures of a sacred isle, from crouching archaic lions to fragments of a colossal Apollo.
Ancient Theatre of Delos
Marble tiers for thousands, above a rainwater cistern on a sanctuary once barred to birth and death.
Cynthus
Rocky summit sanctuary ruins marking the mythical birthplace of Apollo and Artemis.
Terrace of the Lions
Row of snarling archaic marble lions guarding a sacred lake, replicas of a seventh-century offering by Naxos.
Neolithic Settlement 5100 - 4500 BCE
Beachside Neolithic village site with stone house foundations, obsidian tools, figurines and the Aegean's earliest dated gold object.